Ink, Iron, and Glass

by Gwendolyn Clare

  Her heart hammered against her ribs. The interlopers didn’t know Veldana like she did, and carrying Jumi’s weight would slow them down, but they had a whole hour’s head start. They might have already reached the Edgemist—they might be dialing their portal device for the return trip even now.

  The Edgemist … of course! The disturbance she’d observed had had nothing to do with a fault in her mother’s alterations to the worldbook. These invaders must have opened a portal while Veldana was still adjusting to the expansions—even a single person coming through at the wrong time would be enough mass to destabilize the Edgemist temporarily.

  Elsa flushed hot with panic and guilt. If only she had thought of that explanation before, there might have been time to prepare, time to fend them off. How could she have been so stupid?

  She scrambled up the last section of the slope, and then it was a straight shot through the forest to reach the Edgemist. She took it at a run, her legs burning, the hard leather pouches that hung from her belt banging against her thighs. The forest opened up into a narrow strip of meadow separating the trees from the Edgemist, and Elsa stumbled to a stop. Her breath still hitching, she fished the portal device from its belt pouch.

  Elsa knew the coordinates for Earth by heart, and she twisted the little brass knobs to the correct settings. The memory rose, unbidden, of the first time Jumi had let her work the portal device—she had been six, and the device had felt unwieldy in her small hands, requiring all her concentration. But she’d had plenty of practice since then, and despite the superior attitudes of European scriptologists like Montaigne, Elsa had taken to the science as if she were born for it. By now the controls were so familiar, she could have dialed the settings with her eyes closed.

  The coordinates set, Elsa flipped the stiff brass switch in the center with her thumb. A small black dot appeared in the Edgemist before her, the mist spiraling around it as if it were the eye of a storm. The black eye irised open until it was an oval portal wide and tall enough to admit a person, and Elsa lunged in.

  The insides of portals weren’t, strictly speaking, existent places, and that was precisely how it felt to be there—as if one no longer existed. It was freezing cold and perfectly dark in a way that felt like the concepts of temperature and light were absent. Elsa knew to keep walking, even though there was nothing to walk on, and nothing to walk toward, and then it was over as suddenly as it had begun.

  She stepped through into a room full of light and smoke, the portal automatically closing behind her. Elsa covered her face with her sleeve for the second time that day—Montaigne’s shelves of worldbooks were burning. The thieves must have set fire to the study after they’d come through.

  A surge of terror flooded her veins. The Veldana worldbook was hidden here, and if the book was destroyed, so was the world. Coughing, she ran to the blank wall where the worldbook’s secret chamber lay hidden. Elsa pressed her palms against the wall the way she’d seen her mother do so many times, but the chamber refused to open for her. She screamed her frustration and slammed her palms against the wall again, but it was useless—the chamber was designed to open only for Jumi, and Jumi was gone.

  Elsa struggled to rein in her racing thoughts. Other books—other worlds—were burning as she wasted time standing there. She should at least try to save what she could. Turning to run for the shelves, Elsa tripped over something on the floor and stumbled. It was a body: portly, middle-aged, lying facedown in a pool of blood. Charles Montaigne, Veldana’s original creator. The abductors were also, apparently, murderers.

  Elsa stared in shock. Jumi had found him infuriating, and had been careful to never leave Elsa alone with him, but murder still seemed an extreme solution.

  A waft of smoke scraped at her lungs and sent her into a fit of coughing. Time was of the essence. The flames consuming the bookshelves had jumped to the curtains of the nearest window and were tentatively starting to crawl across the wooden floor. Elsa scanned the shelves for the familiar spine of the Veldana worldbook, in case it was outside the wall vault, but she didn’t find it. So she went to the shelf with the lowest flames. Squinting against the heat, she pulled down the least scorched of the volumes—the ones that might not be damaged beyond repair. She rescued another mildly blackened volume from the floor near Montaigne’s body and fled, her arms full, her lungs scoured with smoke, from the house.

  Out on the street, Elsa was surprised to see that a small crowd of Montaigne’s neighbors had gathered. Evening was falling over Paris, yellow gaslight from the streetlamps pooling along the cobblestones. The smoke from the fire cast a gray blot against the dark violet of the sky. Elsa stumbled down the front steps and dropped her armful of books in the street, then nearly went down with them as a coughing fit overtook her. Her lungs felt scorched dry, as if the fire had gotten inside her, and the damp evening air provided no relief.

  She turned to run back in and rescue another armload of books, but someone grabbed her and held her back.

  “You can’t, miss! The house is lost,” the man said.

  She struggled and kicked. “You don’t understand. The worlds are burning!”

  Either the onlookers did not know the house belonged to a renowned scriptologist, or they understood but simply did not find her argument compelling. Another of Montaigne’s neighbors came over to help drag her back. Frustration bloomed in her chest like a dark flower. She should not have wasted time on those other worldbooks, she should not have left without Veldana—if she couldn’t get the wall safe to open, she should have beaten down the wall with her bare fists and dragged the whole thing out.

  The fire was spreading too fast, flames already visible in the front of the house through the sitting room windows. Her world was still inside, but there was nothing she could do now.

  Elsa sagged in their grip, despairing, and they let go, returning immediately to a distance dictated by propriety. “The fire brigade’s been called for,” the first one said, as if this would be a comfort. He reached down to retrieve his top hat, which had fallen in the struggle. “Are you well now, miss?”

  “What a ridiculous question,” she snapped, and turned away from him.

  She knelt on the cobblestones beside what books she had managed to save. She opened the closest one and pressed her fingers to the pages, feeling for the familiar buzz of a live worldbook. There was a subtle vibration, like the rubbing together of a cricket’s wings, but it swelled and receded in a disturbing fashion. A finished worldbook should feel confident and solid, but this one was weak with fluctuations.

  Elsa could feel the eyes of the crowd, as hot against her back as the fire itself. She had neither time nor patience for considering what they made of the situation—an angry brown girl in peasant clothes emerging from the house of their respectable, well-to-do neighbor. But whatever they thought, a crowded avenue was not the place to assess the extent of the fire damage done to the books.

  Elsa pushed her sweat-damp hair out of her face and looked around. On the far side of the street, a black coach clattered by, the horses rearing and rolling their wide eyes in fear, the coachman shouting curses as he fought for control. When the carriage had passed, Elsa scooped up the books and stalked across the street, away from prying eyes.

  She turned the first corner, putting a building between her and the curious gazes of the crowd, and stood in a patch of shadow between the streetlamps. Using her legs like bookends, she set the books down between her feet to free her hands, then took her pocket-sized book from its belt pouch. It wasn’t a proper worldbook so much as a directory of places—a means by which to target the portal device and open a door from one location on Earth to another. A heretical application of scriptology, by the standards of European science, but for Elsa it was an achievement worthy of pride.

  She skipped past the core text in the front, where the book’s properties and functions were defined, and flipped through the destinations described in the back. Her hands shook a little as she considered where to go. H
er mind went immediately to the one person on Earth whom she knew could be counted upon for assistance: her mother’s old mentor, Alek de Vries. So she found the page where she’d scribed a description of the canal outside de Vries’s flat in Amsterdam.

  Taking out the portal device, she read the coordinates from the little doorbook, then tuned the brass knobs to the proper settings. When she flipped the switch, the dark disk of the portal widened, slicing through the very air of the alleyway—it hung there, unattached to anything, and even though Elsa had done this before, the sight of a portal with no Edgemist still disquieted her a bit. The real world didn’t work in sensible ways.

  As she tucked the portal device back into its pouch, she heard the distant clatter of dozens of hooves and the creak of massive wheels behind her—the Parisian fire brigade, at last, arriving too late to do more than quell the spread of the blaze. Elsa let out a frustrated huff, hefted her stack of rescued books, and walked into the portal. She stepped through the infinite coldness and out onto a cobbled walkway tucked between a narrow canal and a row of looming four-story brick buildings all squeezed together like books on an overfull shelf. Amsterdam.

  The portal winked closed of its own accord, and Elsa stepped up onto the stoop and shifted the books to rest on her hip, freeing one hand. She yanked down on the bell pull for de Vries’s flat, counting the seconds until he opened the front door.

  De Vries was tall and skinny, bald on top but with the thick, cultivated mustache of a Victorian gentleman. He was wearing a burgundy smoking jacket, the velvet a little worn around the cuffs. Elsa thought of him as tragically old, though there weren’t any Veldanese older than about forty years, so she supposed she didn’t have much basis for comparison. In any case, he had laugh wrinkles around the eyes and frown lines between his brows, and at the moment the latter were the more prominent.

  “Elsa, dear, what are you doing here? Where’s Jumi?” he said in Dutch, adjusting his wire-frame spectacles as if she might be some sort of illusion.

  “A lot has happened. Let me in, it will take some time to explain,” Elsa said, smoothly switching to Dutch.

  One of the characteristics scribed into the Veldana worldbook gave Veldanese the ability to speak a new language within minutes of hearing it—no fuss over grammar, no laboring to memorize vocabulary. Though Elsa had known de Vries since she was a baby, so Dutch felt almost as natural to her as Veldanese.

  “Of course, of course,” de Vries said, holding the door open wide and running his other hand over his hairless pate.

  De Vries reached to unburden her, but Elsa held on to the books and pushed past him up the stairs to his second-floor flat. Out of politeness, she waited at the top for de Vries to let them both in.

  “So?” de Vries said as he closed the door behind them. “Are you going to tell me why you’re soot-stained and smelling of smoke?”

  Briefly, Elsa wondered how de Vries could even tell, considering that both he and his sitting room smelled strongly of pipe tobacco. She dropped the stack of worldbooks on a credenza beside the door and said, “Montaigne was killed. The library was in flames when I came through from Veldana. I saved what I could.”

  De Vries swore a long chain of words he really oughtn’t say in front of a lady. He had been close friends with Montaigne—how that had worked, given the uneasy truce between Montaigne and Jumi, Elsa couldn’t guess—and the loss of Montaigne’s library was a terrible waste by anyone’s standards.

  “De Vries!” she said, needing him to focus. “That isn’t all. I don’t have the Veldana worldbook. Jumi is the only one who can open the chamber where it’s kept. Veldana was still in the house when it burned.”

  “Oh, Elsa. That doesn’t mean…,” de Vries began, awkward in his gentleness. “I don’t know much about the design of her wall safe, but the worldbook may very well have survived the fire precisely because it was locked inside.”

  “Perhaps. But if the worldbook’s damaged, I can’t risk going back there. Not ever.” Elsa ground her teeth together, determined not to let him see the anxiety that burned like acid behind her breastbone. A damaged worldbook meant a damaged world, and without its core properties intact—properties like breathable air and solid ground—she’d be opening a portal to her own unpleasant demise. Not to mention that there’d be no one left alive to return to.

  He put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “If Veldana is intact, your mother will realize you’re missing and port here to look for you. Don’t worry, you won’t be stuck with me for long.”

  “No, I’m afraid she won’t.” The words caught in her smoke-roughened throat, and Elsa had to force them out. “She’s gone, de Vries. There was a kind of smoke that makes you sleep, and when I woke up, she was missing. Taken.”

  “Gone,” he repeated, and sat down suddenly on a footstool, the news landing like a blow. “Jumi is in the hands of God knows who?”

  “Which means there’s no one left in Veldana who knows how to operate a portal device. The link between our worlds is severed, if Veldana still exists at all.”

  “It means more than that,” de Vries said, his lips pressed together in a grim line. “A talented scriptologist like Jumi being abducted … it could mean someone is making a play for power. But who? The French government?”

  Elsa blinked, unfazed by his concerns. “I don’t particularly care for your Earth politics. What I need is to find a way to ascertain the status of Veldana.” Quietly, she added, “And a way to find my mother.”

  He nodded. “We can go to the house in the morning. If Veldana was destroyed, we may be able to establish it from the wreckage. And either way, we should look for clues while the scene is still fresh. Whoever took Jumi must have come through the portal from Veldana at Montaigne’s house, and they may have left something behind in their haste.”

  A seed of shame planted itself in Elsa’s chest. Montaigne’s house was the only link she had to her mother’s abductors, and she’d run away from it like a scared little girl, naively hoping de Vries could make everything all right. “We should go back now…,” she said, reaching for the doorbook.

  He raised his eyebrows. “And do what, precisely? Stand in the street all night while the fire brigade stops the fire from spreading? Dig through the ashes in the dark? No, we’ll get some sleep and go in the morning. Then, at least the ashes will be cold.”

  “The ashes may be cold, but the trail will be, too,” Elsa said, folding her arms.

  “I imagine that’s why they killed Montaigne and set the house ablaze,” he said quietly. “To make it impossible for anyone to learn who had been there.”

  “So you’re saying it’s hopeless?”

  “I’m saying this isn’t the sort of problem we’re likely to solve before supper. Which I’d guess you could do with some of, after your ordeal.”

  Elsa wanted to snap a denial at him, but in truth she was famished. Since breakfast, she’d had nothing but a couple of wild plums found during her survey work. She sighed, relenting. “I’ll go try to find something clean to change into.”

  In de Vries’s guest room, Elsa unbuckled her belt and shed her soot-stained Veldanese apron and dress, then filled the washbasin and cleaned herself up as best she could. Only then did she discover that both of her knees were quite impressively bruised from the spill she’d taken on the slate floor of the cottage. There hadn’t been time to notice the pain.

  Leaving in such a rush, she also hadn’t spared a moment to let anyone know what was happening. Assuming Veldana still existed, did everyone back home think she and Jumi had abandoned them? Elsa couldn’t claim to be friends with Revan anymore, but she found she didn’t like the thought of him wondering why she’d vanished.

  Of course, he might not be wondering anything anymore. He might never again have the chance to feel anger or hurt or any other emotion. Revan, and everyone else in Veldana, might be dead. The thought made Elsa’s chest so tight she could barely breathe, and she had to splash water on her face again to dispe
l the panic. She did her best to push the idea out of her mind.

  In the wardrobe hung a couple of her mother’s spare dresses—French fashions with high collars and puffed sleeves, ridiculously impractical compared with simple Veldanese garb. She’d worn them whenever she came to visit. Elsa leaned close to take one of the dresses off its hanger, but froze when a familiar smell reached her nose: lemon verbena, Jumi’s favorite scent, still lingering in the cloth. Suddenly, she wanted her mother with the fervency of a small child lost in the woods, her eyes stinging with the start of tears. The weight of everything that had happened, losing Jumi and Veldana in quick succession, felt like it was crushing her. She bit down on her lip hard, and swore to herself she would not cry.

  * * *

  In the morning, Elsa took de Vries with her through a portal to Paris. She knew he did not generally approve of the doorbook’s method of travel, thought it was too dangerous for casual use, but this time he reluctantly agreed they shouldn’t waste time taking the train. As they stepped out of the portal, de Vries brushed a hand down the front of his jacket as if surprised to discover all his body parts had made it through in their correct orientations.

  From the street, Montaigne’s house looked a sodden, ashy ruin. The second story was still standing, but only barely, the roof having collapsed into the bedrooms at the front of the house. What windowpanes remained unbroken were coated in black soot. Elsa didn’t know much about fire control, but it seemed lucky the blaze hadn’t spread up and down the street.

  “Well. I suppose it could be worse,” said de Vries, climbing the front steps. “Watch your footing.”

  The front door was off its hinges, so they walked right in through the empty doorframe. Sections of the interior walls had collapsed, leaving behind a skeleton of charred wooden structural beams, and avalanches of wood and plaster fragments cluttered the floor. The hem of Elsa’s skirt collected soot as she waded deeper into the wreckage, making her glad she’d dressed in her already ruined Veldanese clothes.